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Hey Paydirt: Your Site Works Just Fine In IE

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Re: Hey Paydirt: Your Site Works Just Fine In IE

#31

Post by gregschlom »

pippy wrote: post #29

Supporting IE has nothing to do with how well it renders a site. Supporting IE carries massive baggage as you have to pin yourself to Microsoft's erratic, tactic based release cycles and limiting yourself with future features. Chrome and Firefox now how have rolling releases and are closely tied with the developer community, so new features and rendering uniformity is what you gain. There's also the ethos you buy int…

> There's also the ethos you buy into by supporting IE: you're supporting a closed source, proprietary internet.

By your reasoning, nobody would write an iPhone app either, or anything targeted for a platform other than GNU/Linux.

Re: Hey Paydirt: Your Site Works Just Fine In IE

#32

Post by FuzzyDunlop »

moron wrote: post #19
FuzzyDunlop wrote: post #12

So, if Microsoft renamed IE10 to something entirely different, and packaged it as a standalone browser, would a site like Paydirt support it then? It seems to work fine, so why not? This, and comments like "The site happening to work" seem to have an underlying prejudice about IE. "It was IE, so it must be fucked some way or another." The old versions are, but try running the site on Chrome 1, or Firefox 3.6 (I belie…

> This, and comments like "The site happening to work" seem to have an underlying prejudice about IE. "It was IE, so it must be fucked some way or another." If it's my comment you're referring to, I said it "happens" to work in IE because if we are to believe the team, they didn't try to make it work in IE. It just does, by coincidence, for now . Support is a commitment, and committing to IE will mean work down the r…

If we leave versions older than 9 out of the equation, however, then how drastic and different is the support really going to be?

And when we consider versions 9 and 10 exclusively, then we know they're more standards compliant browsers. Thus they don't work by coincidence, they work because they follow the standard. And because of that, it's not for now, it's from now on.

As an addendum, any startup or business that wants to pull this trick automatically loses a potential customer. I'm not putting any of my money towards a company that will turn the customer's choice of browser against them.

Re: Hey Paydirt: Your Site Works Just Fine In IE

#33

Post by rhizome »

mikeryan wrote: post #26
moron wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This, and comments like "The site happening to work" seem to have an underlying prejudice about IE. "It was IE, so it must be fucked some way or another." If it's my comment you're referring to, I said it "happens" to work in IE because if we are to believe the team, they didn't try to make it work in IE. It just does, by coincidence, for now . Support is a commitment, and committing to IE will mean work down the r…

It just does, by coincidence, for now So you're saying its just a fluke that IE9+ supports the same standards as Firefox and Chrome? Amazing luck that.

Historically speaking, yes, but perhaps intentional in the present day. Who's to say, and better yet, who's going to spend scarce developer resources on proving it one way or the other? Unless you're doing corporate, that is.

Re: Hey Paydirt: Your Site Works Just Fine In IE

#34

Post by arkitaip »

tnorthcutt wrote: post #25

They were using many CSS3 features supported since IE9, like transforms & border-radius, but just not adding the –ms vendor prefix entry They had the “-ms” prefix for CSS3 gradients which was added in IE10 They added support for -khtml-box-shadow but not -ms-box-shadow??? They didn’t support Opera either unfortunately All this crap recently about web standards and Opera adopting the webkit prefix and how bad some peo…

Do their customers care? Does it affect their bottom line?

Re: Hey Paydirt: Your Site Works Just Fine In IE

#35

Post by 5teev »

brlewis wrote: post #2

This may be schadenfreude, but as someone who's been around the web a long time, it really tickles me to see Microsoft have to fake their user agent string to get around an arbitrary browser restriction. Other browsers used to fake the IE user agent string. I suppose it's full circle since IE originally had to pose as Netscape's browser (Mozilla compatible).

Even using Mac IE5 (the best browser for Macs in its time) I sometimes had to fake the user agent to use some sites. So I also felt a little twinge of schadenfreude on reading this.

Re: Hey Paydirt: Your Site Works Just Fine In IE

#36

Post by recoiledsnake »

tnorthcutt wrote: post #25

They were using many CSS3 features supported since IE9, like transforms & border-radius, but just not adding the –ms vendor prefix entry They had the “-ms” prefix for CSS3 gradients which was added in IE10 They added support for -khtml-box-shadow but not -ms-box-shadow??? They didn’t support Opera either unfortunately All this crap recently about web standards and Opera adopting the webkit prefix and how bad some peo…

I use Opera as my main browser and I cringe when clicking on a link in HN which supposedly shows off usage of cool new features in HTML/CSS/JS/WebGL whatever. Then I hunt around the site which breaks on me with no message. Then have to trawl through the HN comments to realize that it only works in Chrome and no one bothers to put that in the headline or on the site. Note that this happens to lots of Google cool features or easter eggs. Is this really taking the web forward or setting it back to the "best works in IE" days (just without that helpful message) ?

And now Opera is pissed at the usage of browser specific extensions and is adding support for -moz and -webkit which is sure to further mess up things.

Re: Hey Paydirt: Your Site Works Just Fine In IE

#37

Post by brlewis »

irahul wrote: post #27
brlewis wrote: post #2

This may be schadenfreude, but as someone who's been around the web a long time, it really tickles me to see Microsoft have to fake their user agent string to get around an arbitrary browser restriction. Other browsers used to fake the IE user agent string. I suppose it's full circle since IE originally had to pose as Netscape's browser (Mozilla compatible).

The arbitrary restriction(not browsers; explicitly placed by the developers) is there to ensure people don't see a broken version. I don't know about the recent IE versions, but earlier versions needed won't center align when I say `margin: 0 auto`(have to do a text-align: center then reset it in child container), have a different boxing model, doesn't support min-height, won't support hover on all elements etc etc.…

If I were interested in buying something from your web site, I would be less likely to bounce somewhere else as a result of seeing an uncentered container than I would as a result of being told to upgrade my browser.

P.S. Browser restritions are placed by developers, speed restrictions by police, and height restrictions by amusement ride operators. It's not the browser, the speed, or the height that's doing the restricting.

Re: Hey Paydirt: Your Site Works Just Fine In IE

#38

Post by Joeri »

dmix wrote: post #20
davidjgraph wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought that. Plus the commenter that tries to explain that Microsoft built up a good deal of "trust debt" over the IE 6-8 period for those who had to code through it, gets the same repeated in the comments. It's all very well that it technically might work, but we're dealing with humans here, humans that have been annoyed for a long time...

Microsofts trust debt will start repairing when noone uses IE7 anymore. It's still at about 10% worldwide so many of use still have to fix mystery JS bugs in IE7 and even still some CSS oddities in IE8.

Not to mention the joy of "can't execute code from a freed script" in IE9 (code that works fine in every other browser, even IE6, magically broke in IE9).

Re: Hey Paydirt: Your Site Works Just Fine In IE

#39

Post by rhizome »

josefresco wrote: post #5
dpearson wrote: post #3

The problem is, IE 9 and 10 are not everywhere. I know for certain that my school (and, I'd be willing to wager, many businesses) only deploys IE 7 and 8. IE 6 still isn't dead, despite Microsoft publicly encouraging migration. Until Microsoft gets IE 9 and 10 adoption up, supporting Internet Explorer is tricky.

The problem really is that they are lumping ALL IE users into one "incompatible bucket" irregardless of the version and features supported. There's no need to get religious here, just support the browsers that have the features your web app needs.

Suffice it to say that Microsoft has a lot to answer for in this department.
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